The Chicago School’s influence in national scientific production regarding Information Science

Abstract The “Chicago School” is an intellectual movement constituted in the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago between 1920 and 1930 and that also extended to Librarianship. In this area, authors such as Lee Pierce Butler, Jesse Hauk Shera, and Lester Eugene Asheim have advocated a pragmatist epistemology as the foundation of Librarianship. This perspective left a legacy of humanistic practice within librarianship that ultimately influenced the epistemological constitution of Information Science. In this sense, this article presents the results of a research whose general objective was to identify the Chicago School’s influence in the national scientific production within Information Science. Specifically, the objectives were to verify through the JITA Classification in which sub-areas of Information Science the Brazilian authors most use the theoretical-methodological resources of the Chicago School and to reflect on this school’s contributions in the publications found. Methodologically, the research was bibliographic, qualitative, and exploratory, without chronological delimitation, and in three databases. As a result, a documentary corpus of 25 articles is presented, most of which were published between 2003 and 2018 in Qualis A1, A2, and B1 journals. We conclude that the influence of Chicago School in the scientific production of Information Science in Brazil occurs within the theoretical and not the practical realm, as suggested by the pragmatism aspect that guides the movement itself.